I usually take notes, think, draw drafts, schemes, etc.. on paper to either advance my ideas or find solutions to certain problems. I noticed that a tablet with a stylus/pencil “may” make it easier.

At first I planned to get a Samsung Android device (I have been using Note 5 for some time and it is VERY good for various note taking styles. REALLY GOOD). Then, I figured out that I didn’t have a new iPad for testing purposes and other necessary stuff. So it was a good excuse to get an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil instead.

Huge fragmentation in Android world requires new devices to be added to local test devices who do not prefer remote device testing services. Not only there are still Android 2.x and 3.x users (for who cares about those users too), there are also variety of modified Android systems (not talking about rooting devices); almost every Android device manufacturer customizes Android for their own use and unfortunately the same Android SDK usage differs on every device (even on every model of some manufacturers).

As a result, testing RADYO on multiple devices and OS versions is a must.

Therefore here is the latest (but not the newly released) device added to test devices which are used to test RADYO.

After the next generation iOS version of RADYO, Android version is updated today to include first steps of RADYO’s Location Based Music Discovery service. Currently playing stations and songs, most popular artists and songs can be seen according to the location. Next favorite but known station is just one touch away!

Employees who are responsible for selecting and/or approving candidates for featured apps for store regions has no context-related experience or imagination. They also are under pressure of heavily invested companies which causes them to ignore exactly the same UI design.

A real example without comments:
They expect the play and the pause buttons to be located at the top right of the screen for a multimedia player application and they say that putting those buttons at he lower center of the screen prevents app from being featured. The app I am writing about is heavily internationalized and localized.

On the other hand, a competitor app which has a big team, got heavily funded and which is not localized and internationalized enough, is chosen for a region that it is not even that popular. This competitor app, by the way, has the exact UI design and uses the same location for the same features.

Proven by the facts, head of Play Store does not care about the real quality or the trends, behaviours of the users of the related store region. I have learned all of these by chatting face to face.

It really seems like all these selections on Google Play Store are mostly political, strategical (based on USA partnerships).

If the head says these, it’s basically over.

He said getting 1 million downloads for my new app is surprising and he said I should be happy enough by still getting 1 million downloads while the competitor is GLOBALLY shown as featured on all store regions. I proved that with features, ratings, stability and the quality of the main functionality, my application beats the competitor but I was just ignored by a huge smile as I am fighting with a company which has a logo in their official presentations and which is a USA based company.

Kind Regards to the head.. My app has been beating the competitor app since the beginning and getting featured by Apple and Microsoft.

How you look at developers (face to face too) is not elegant. (I saw it wasn’t just me) This may not cause you to loose many apps, but this is going to make you loose respect and respect is everything. I hope this fact makes sense for you too.

I can’t write enough about this…

Yes my apps are never going to have chance for being featured from now on. Believe it or not I do not care it anymore and I am never going to put play and pause button at the top-right of the screen while all other mediaplayers are (even those created directly by Google) centering those buttons at the lower part of the screen. To talk about UI guidelines, you really have to experience it for different contexts. This seems a very big problem for regions out of USA, for developers in USA those of whom work hard to bring incredible work to compete in store without getting any investment.

Yesterday, Google officially told in Istanbul, Turkey: Functionality is irrelevant while determining featured apps for a country. UI is everything for an app to get featured. Only apps with the perfect graphics or the app that was somehow partnered with Google will be selected. It is said that only 1 single Turkish app was selected by Google. Google says that they have to fill the screen with apps featured in USA if there are no cool looking apps in Turkey or in any other country.

This idea breaks competition between apps and demotivates developers. It is also just a show-off of Google employees.

As a side note: Microsoft and Apple do this localization of application store contents in a better way. Microsoft > Apple > Google

Google may be right. But as a user on and a developer on all these platforms, I do want to see local content. I care less about apps mainly created for other regions of the world. I would prefer badly designed local content than perfectly designed foreign content.

Assume that Google is perfectly right about what they are doing. In that case it is obvious that there is a common and a big problem related to UI guidelines or how they get interpreted by designers and developers; as only 1 single app was designed ‘that good’ from all of those applications, developers and companies. When compared with Apple and Microsoft, almost all of the apps are from the local region.

Android version comes with premium features with $0.00 price tag. There are no seperate paid version of RADYO on Android.

There has been a huge support from RADYO users and with the help of the beta test team who were composed of volunteers, even with the first version, RADYO (on Android too) outperforms all popular live radio applications (including paid versions of them) both in features and stability.